Michael Cayley

Horses and rider diving through the hoop of fire
without charring a cell, the spangled girl
cycling on the high wire, the stern face
which governs tigers with a whisper of a whip,
...

Two old fishermen squat on the beach
looking outward at dusk.

Behind them the din of the harbour,
...

A fisherman leans on an old stone bridge,
flattened by the sun behind him
to two dark dimensions. The paths
on either bank are lost in nettles.
...

Rows of headstones jostle for air.
The dead are too many:
Copton and Neville, Boulton, Letchley,
the village breathing through the same names
...

The doctor measures millilitres into his syringe,
puts all your lights out and packs his bag.
'Should be all right, ' he says at the door,
and 'God bless.'
...

I tell how I stuttered boo on Eton steps
when the queen's horses and men
fetched her maid's sick boy to put him together again.
...

Speech is spare as girders. 'G'mornen''
on a rare day, but like as not
just a hint of a nod will barely quiver
his straight lines. His arm extends
...

My love seemed lost in dark thought,
unseeing. I stepped away
softly, not daring to intrude.
I turned to my love again
...

Even at night the sea's innumerable fingers
stitch and unstitch the shore in white.
Needles of spray which in high wind would mass
and twist like daggers in the chalk cliffs
...

The fragile ribs of mist on the morning river
have faded to transparency.
The sun has no time for dreamy eyes
or the sorrow of dew.
...

Only reflections move
in the still pool. Trees' mirrored trunks
stand guard against the light.
I bring too many thoughts, too many
...

The lilacs have withered now.
The rose's petals will only repeat
the last generation's patterns, go
the same way. Spring's march
...

A chant rises, a chant falls
under hard red sun
in the rituals of death.
...

Log-walls rot in the ghost-town
we had thought more than gold-rush shanties.
No sheriff would waste a minute
to keep peace where only two old-timers
...

The trees are centurions,
upright exemplars of master races.
...

For weeks now we’ve been picking at sandstone
in hard sun. Our hands are rough
from too much grit; our brains surfeited
on this scragend of hillside, its dry monotony
...

The clouds close in. A plane
transcends them, invisibly
escaping earshot,
...

Unfinished sentences
eddy, now loud, nor murmured, as the
short breath catches her.
She prefers solitude where memory lies
...

He was scarcely a model for his age:
Circe, Calypso both had him
without demur, as did forgotten slave-girls
who smoothed tensions on the plains round Troy.
...

Sunlight on sage.
When her eyes glow
what gold does she glimpse?
Or is time just foreshortened,
...